


NaNoWriMo

by GrownUpBabyAlligator



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 08:55:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8483251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrownUpBabyAlligator/pseuds/GrownUpBabyAlligator
Summary: I have no idea what this is about, all I have to go on is an idea about a rusty antique meat grinder that was found in a hidden tunnel. Because that did actually happen once.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to really rough, as in, not edited much because I will never actually sit down and write if I have to worry about editing. Sorry about my punctuation, you're gonna have to suffer.

We hadn’t lived at the house for very long when we found the passage under the barn, and the meat grinder. The people who owned the property before we did had left a huge mess: crushed beer cans and plastic bags and chew containers and shotgun shells littered just about every corner of the property. We started cleaning it up right when we moved in, but we kept finding more pockets of filth, spread in random locations all over the property. It seemed there wasn’t a single place the previous inhabitants hadn’t left shit everywhere-- around the house itself, stacked in piles and heaps in the barn, at the end of the driveway near the gate, at the mailbox, at every corner of the cornfield, even out in the woods behind the house. It took 45 minutes to walk out there and yet somehow these assholes had managed to spread piles and piles of weird-ass junk-- a washing machine peppered with bullet holes, a partially decomposed mattress, dozens and dozens of glass bottles and 2 or three inches of broken glass-- back there. It wasn’t a huge surprise to find a pile of rusty antiques squirreled down a narrow little dirt tunnel behind the barn. 

 

It was more the randomness of what we found that was surprising. There were huge heavy rusty metal cables, which Marie said were probably used in the logging of the back half of the property, although the trees are so tall now it’s hard to imagine how long ago that must have been. There were the wooden buckets, the panes of glass from who-knows-what building or barn-- they weren’t shaped right for the house or any of the windows in the barn. There were the nasty-looking leghold traps that must have meant the demise of who knows how many unfortunate animals. And then the meat grinder.

 

Marie and I both looked at each other silently when we realized what it was, one of her eyebrows cocked over her hazel-green eyes, little fine lines appearing at the corners of her mouth and her eyes, in an expression I knew to mean, “What the actual fuck.”

 

All the hair on the back of my neck stood up and my hands started shaking so badly that I almost dropped the flashlight, the beam dancing erratically over the rusty pile of mystery junk and onto the damp dirt walls behind it. She knew, right away of course, that I was terrified and that my heart was going to act up. She took my hand and we both ducked our heads and stoop-walked the 30 or so feet back out of the tunnel and into the field behind the barn. 

 

I stood there taking deep breaths with my eyes closed, raised my face toward the overcast sky and felt the heat in my cheeks cooled almost immediately by the October mist, and Marie rubbed my shoulders quietly and then I could hear Scally come softly trotting around the back of the barn, stopping so close to me that my hand rested in the wiry hair on his back. There’s not much that I can really do to make the heart palpitations stop, but if there’s anything that’s good for calming me down it’s a big hairy Wolfhound. He leaned against my leg, pressing his neck into my hip. Finally I opened my eyes, and Marie was questioning me with her eyes even though she didn’t say anything.

 

“I’m fine,” I said. And it was pretty much true. But I was already thinking about the leghold traps and wanting to get them off the property, out of our home. I didn’t want to go back into that tunnel again but I also did not want to have to think about those rusty grips and chains laying around behind the barn where Scally kept watch over our chickens and goats. I didn’t want to have to think about how many animals they held until they met their unfortunate ends. And that meat grinder. Something about it creeped me out intensely and I did not want it sticking around. I knew I would have to come back, and take care of it.


End file.
